Hi Alan, Concerning the needs to find an item by its name, did you consider using a "search as you type" field that filters the tree ? I mean like in ITunes that allows to find quickly a song via its name/its artists/the album name/... by hidding the songs which meta-data do not match the search field. In your case, as soon as a node or leaf name and meta-data (don't restrict to only the name of the tree nodes) matches the search field, the tree branch must displayed and opened (and possibly the node that match is displayed in bold)..others tree branch are completely hidden. . I've seen this interaction in Eclipse: its is used in its preferences window where there is a lot of things...I found it well suited for the task of searching by name ( one problem in Eclipse is that the filtering is restricted to the name of the nodes and do not apply on the leaf content ...)
Concerning the scanning, did you consider using a "column view" instead of a "tree view" such as in (Apple one more time!) in Mac OSX Finder (check it out in http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-1651.html) ? Personnaly, I don't like it very in Finder because I always have some resizing issues, but if you have a tree depth that is fixed, it can perhaps do the trick . (note that in this case, "search as you type" won't work!!) Hope its helps ! Pierre ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
